A cell transmission model for dynamic lane reversal with autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles admit consideration of novel traffic behaviors such as reservation-based intersection controls and dynamic lane reversal. The authors present a cell transmission model formulation for dynamic lane reversal. For deterministic demand, the authors formulate the dynamic lane reversal control problem for a single link as an integer program and derive theoretical results. In reality, demand is not known perfectly at arbitrary times in the future. To address stochastic demand, the authors present a Markov decision process formulation. Due to the large state size, the Markov decision process is intractable. However, based on theoretical results from the integer program, the authors derive an effective heuristic. They demonstrate significant improvements over a fixed lane configuration both on a single bottleneck link with varying demands, and on the downtown Austin network.